Today we are pleased to share a new paper written by Alexandre, Mas and Radcliffe titled ‘Regulating New Banking Models that Can Bring Financial Services to All’. The paper argues that “branchless banking” is misleading as it implies that we can do away with bank branches altogether. Rather, they advocate for branch specialisation where the branch role is higher-level, meeting more sophisticated needs such as complex credit services, liquidity, and customer redress. Basic services — those which reach the poor directly, are often better provided by non-bank retail outlets — not unlike those that mobile network operators already use to provide mobile money.
Regulating New Banking Models that can Bring Financial Services to All
By: Andrew Zerzan: September 2nd, 2010Will Mobile Money Bring Microinsurance to the Poor?
By: Camilo Tellez: August 31st, 2010
Why is insurance widely available to those in the developed world, but not the poor—whose demand for insurance, given how close they live to the economic brink, is arguably greater? The answer is simple: transaction costs. The cost of selling and underwriting insurance and of administering a claim does not decrease in proportion to the value of the policy. Using traditional channels and processes, insurance companies simply cannot write policies with values below a certain floor without pricing them unrealistically.
Can Pakistan’s flood victims find hope in mobile money?
By: Maha Khan: August 26th, 2010
While mobile platforms have been used by aid agencies to distribute electronic vouchers redeemable for cash or food, such as the UN World Food Programme’s (WFP) pilot project for Iraqi refugees in Syria, mobile money is still relatively new in this field. Aid agencies are, however, coming to realize the cost effectiveness, speed, and resilience that mobile money payments can provide in emergency situations.
Getting the Agent Commission Model Right
By: Paul Leishman: August 20th, 2010By now, most mobile money practitioners recognize that for a service to succeed, the agents that support it need to be making money. In recent months, we’ve written about how mobile network operators have carefully managed their customer/agent ratios over time to ensure agents are provided with a sufficient volume of transactions to stay interested – but volume is only half of the equation. To keep agents happy, mobile network operators must also ensure the commission models they present to agents are well designed
The Hidden Costs of Inactive Users
By: Neil Davidson: August 12th, 2010Around the world, mobile money deployments are racking up large numbers of new customers. But as certain commentators have noted, these numbers are sometimes misleading. In some deployments, a gap is opening up between the number of registered users and the number of active users. Does this make the number of registered users irrelevant? Quite the contrary—a large gap between the number of registered and unregistered customers represents a big problem. Operators have to spend money for every customer that they acquire; if those customers don’t start using the service, then the operator who signed them up has started to dig a financial hole for themselves. And those holes can be pretty deep.
Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? Structuring Win-Win Partnerships Between Banks and MNOs
By: Amitabh Saxena: August 2nd, 2010By now it’s a well-known fact: strategic alliances in general are complex to structure, and harder to manage. This is especially true when stakeholders are large, powerful, and from different industries with fundamentally distinct business models, as the case is with banks and mobile operators. What, then, are different ways that these two parties can structure a mutually beneficial partnership to offer mobile money?
USAID Releases Mobile Financial Services Risk Matrix
By: Camilo Tellez: July 29th, 2010Mobile Financial Services offer significant opportunities for improving the efficiency of financial services by expanding access and lowering transaction costs. The explosive growth of use of mobile money has had the unintended benefit of increasing public involvement in the formal financial system, including expansion of savings accounts in the regulated financial intermediaries.
MMU Publishes Glossary of Mobile Money Terminology
By: Neil Davidson: July 13th, 2010To welcome newcomers to mobile money, to facilitate effective dialogue among industry participants, and to communicate with the public and other stakeholders, the Mobile Money for the Unbanked programme is today releasing a set of definitions of mobile money terminology.
Mobile World Live 2010: Untapped Areas of Growth and Opportunities for Mobile Money
By: Camilo Tellez: June 28th, 2010Entering a new market touches every part of a company’s strategy; from technology, marketing, and customer service to product offerings, pricing and distribution channels. In the following two presentations, Olga Morawczynski from AppLab (Grameen Foundation) and Daryl Collins from Bankable Frontiers and Author of Portfolios of the Poor discuss ways to build on the basic mobile money proposition by understanding the unbanked customer’s needs.
Methodology for Assessing Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing Risks
By: Camilo Tellez: June 15th, 2010Mobile money services are emerging all over the world and financial regulators are unfamiliar with the money laundering and terrorist financing (ML/TF) risks arising from these new services. The current anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) rules are often applied disproportionately to the risks involved, thus hampering the adoption of mobile money services amongst consumers, the poor in particular. It is, for example, disproportionate to put a high customer due diligence burden on very poor customers who are transacting very low amounts for legitimate reasons. Excessively strict ‘know your customer’ (KYC) rules can be impossible for the poor to comply with, keeping them locked into the informal economy without preventing ML/TF.
News Tracker
- 1. Vodacom South Africa launches M-Pesa
- 2. Easypaisa introduces donation service
- 3. Yu Cash offer international remittances from US and UK
- 4. Easypaisa introduces international money transfer service
- 5. Maroc Telecom Launches HomeSend
- 6. Bank of Philippine Islands and Globe Telecom launch cashierless payment service
- 7. Mobile Phone banking and insurance transforming the world
- 8. Mobile money’s innovation crisis
- 9. Safaricom's M-Pesa Users Rise to 61% in July From Year Ago
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